Painting, Planting, And More: How Yaymaker Reinvented The Night Out

Dan Hermann started his business with a simple idea: When you go to a bar, wouldn’t it be fun to drink and paint at the same time?

To find out, Hermann supplied 50 patrons of a Boston pub with aprons, paints, brushes, easels, and canvases, plus a local artist to instruct them. That was in 2012 and a month later, the company was selling out its events, with a waiting list that included up to four times the number of people it could host. “We knew we could sell more tickets,” says Hermann, cofounder of Paint Nite, which soon expanded to other events and is now known as Yaymaker. “We just needed to get more events on the calendar.”

Courtesy of Yaymaker

A growing number of bars and restaurants are serving up “learning experiences” along with their happy hour fare, creating a burgeoning new market for craft-maker event companies like Yaymaker. Seeing an opportunity to extend the brand beyond its “sip and paint” events, company CMO Stephanie Brocoum helped rename the company to Yaymaker in January.

Each month, Yaymaker sells about 100,000 tickets to more than 6,000 events. The venues hosting these events welcome ticket holders to eat dinner, drink beer, and learn how to build musical instruments, assemble drones, decorate cookies, or arrange flowers.

The recipe behind these events is one part maker movement and three parts social interaction.

“Consumers are addicted to their mobile devices,” says CEO David Krauter. “But when you go to a Yaymaker event, you have to put your phone down, and remember what it’s like to put your thought and energy into creating something while having in-person conversations with other people.”

The company primarily sells tickets direct to consumers via its website and then splits the revenue with venues and the artists teaching the classes. Yaymaker also partners with local businesses in over 1,400 cities across the US and Canada that license the company’s event platform. “We provide our partners with a list of venues, access to our ticketing app, manage RSVPs, and provide insurance, accounting, procurement, and distribution services,” Krauter says. The company takes a 30% cut of tickets sold through its partners, but there’s no upfront charge to use the platform.

Growing Pains

During its rapid growth, Yaymaker struggled to gain the visibility and control needed to manage its finances and operate an increasingly complex supply chain.

When CFO Bill Meagher joined the company four years ago, the “department” he walked into consisted of one accountant, who tracked Yaymaker’s finances by checking its bank balance every day. “We had no formal budgets or forecasts, no close process, and payments were coming out of multiple systems,” Meagher recalls. “We needed a system that could help us manage our finances properly.”

Today, Meagher has a four-person staff that use Oracle NetSuite to manage everything from payroll and benefits to accounts payable, treasury and supply chain. “We chose Oracle NetSuite because it has a lot of APIs that make it easy for us to connect with other software applications, consolidate financial data, and run reports,” Meagher says.

Oracle NetSuite also has a module that supports deferred revenue efficiently, which is important because Yaymaker doesn’t recognize revenue from ticket sales until after an event has ended. “We need a tool that can help us automatically move a sale from the balance sheet to the P&L after events happen,” Meagher says.

The company used to take 60 days to close its books. “We were downloading, reviewing, and then consolidating payment information from Stripe, PayPal, and our bank accounts, as well as manually cross-checking our internal ticketing database,” Meagher says. Now, using Oracle NetSuite to track and manage cash and expenses, “we’re reconciling bank statements and running reports within five days after the month—without even touching the data,” he says. “The system reconciles itself.”

By gaining the visibility and control needed to manage its financial operations, Yaymaker can keep more inventory on hand, enabling the company to quickly pick, pack, and ship the supplies needed to each event venue. Tracking the location, quantity, and movement of pallets filled with aprons, paintbrushes, and paint used to be difficult. “Inventory was stored everywhere, it was hard to know where it was and how we were going to get it to the venue in time for an event,” Meagher says.

Now, the company can streamline all of its supply chain operations—from cutting purchase orders and receiving supplies, to managing inventory and running logistics. “If we’re producing a flower arranging class, we need to make sure we have enough cold storage and that we order the flowers just in time, so that they don’t wilt before the event,” Meagher says.

With NetSuite managing its financial and supply chain activities, Yaymaker’s leaders can focus on finding the best ways to produce, staff, and run all of the logistics for its events. “We want to develop closer relationships with vendors, understand how to grow in new markets, and then transfer that knowledge to local partners, who can help us scale the Yaymaker platform,” Meagher says.